If Thalidomide had been released in 2020 instead of the late 1950s

1 million harmed babies instead of 100,000?

One of the things I love about Substack is the engagement in the commentary section. I feel I learn as much from there as I impart in the articles I write.

I also like reading the commentary sections of other articles and often, I read those first before reading the article itself to get an idea of how useful and perhaps, provocative, the article is. I like provocation (in the positive sense), i.e. stuff that gets people talking.

Undoubtedly, there are few more provocative raconteurs than Arkmedic.

Recently, he got into a bit of dialogue with the now infamous ICU consultant - Dr Caz Sampson. It started in the commentary section of a John Sullivan post and carried on in the commentary section of Arkmedic’s own Substack about the “miscarriage of statistics” when it comes to analysing pregnancy outcomes and the COVID mRNA experiment:

A miscarriage of statistics

It ended with this flippant remark from “Caz”:

The reason I dislike those who knowingly share misinformation about vaccines (who are those I call anti-vaxxers - irrespective of whether they themselves have chosen to be vaccinated or not) as I have seen this cause harm in the real world.

Dr Ah Kahn Syed promptly retorted with something that made me wonder how many deformed babies might have been born if Thalidomide had been released in 2020 instead of the late 1950s.

It’s the same script (“Turtles All The Way Down”) but with the brainwashing and propaganda amped up considerably due to social media and a few more decades of pharma-capture of the medical establishment, by my reckoning, there may easily have been ten times more deformed and dead babies than the 100,000 estimated to have been caused by Thalidomide.

His provocative response was so good, it didn’t deserve to remain in the comments where only oddbods like me dwell. So, here is Dr Syed’s response:

This is probably the most honest thing you have said so far. You have a personal bias against people who disagree with you. It's human nature. But as a doctor, when you lose humility (because you think you know better) you become no better than Joseph Mengele. I don't say that lightly.

What you did was contributed to the most heinous mass medical experimentation on the human population ever, that killed tens of thousands of people. This is no exaggeration given the Australian and UK all-cause mortality data. Yet you think you know better and thought it was OK to disparage people on the basis that they declined to take part in this experiment. You know it was an experiment because it was performed on the basis of a clinical trial which has yet still not ended (ends this year).

Let's make an analogy. You have been told that thalidomide treats RSV. Merck did a RCT (at Mercks' own lab) that showed that thalidomide reduced RSV PCR positivity by 95%. Because somebody somewhere died of RSV-related secondary bacterial pneumonia and because an anonymous guideline came from NICE, the ICU consultants around the country have colluded to create social media accounts to stop "disinformation about thalidomide" and to say that it is "safe and effective for stopping RSV, which can kill people (that we withhold antibiotics from, but we won't mention that)". You go online and disparage people who don't want to take it as "selfish" "anti-thalidomiders" "RSV deniers" and "people that use resources". You find a patient with RSV who was not given antibiotics and instead of giving them antibiotics you tell them that there is no treatment, but if they really can't breathe you are the ECMO expert and you are going to put them on ECMO because they didn't take the preventative thalidomide. Then they die and you go back onto social media and post tweets that say "I have just seen someone die of RSV because they didn't take thalidomide. Don't be selfish, take thalidomide". And then you get Viki Male to tell pregnant women to take it because "multiple retrospective studies that we don't have the data for, and were conducted by people employed or with ties to Merck, showed that the thalidomide was safe and effective for preventing RSV and somebody somewhere died of RSV (because we didn't treat their pneumonia)".

That, Caz, is what you did. You just went along with what you were told on the summaries on your iphone and you didn't read the papers or look at the data yourself. And when people like me - who has looked at the papers, and has published more than you, and has a PhD and a medical degree - make scientifically valid appraisals of the data you disparage, then block (if on twitter) then whinge about it (very embarrasing that, by the way).

And still you have no humility. You are sure you are right but you didn't read any of the data or understand it or have an ounce of scepticism when reading it, enough to say "hold on this pharma funded study is biased". Then when the vaccinated started rolling into your ICU instead of checking yourself at that point you doubled down. You didn't question the data even then. You had to, because I actually believe that you treated people differently on the basis of their vaccination (thalidomide denial) status. You said "this person isn't vaccinated what a selfish person let's put them straight on the ventilator, no antibiotics, no steroids. They made their choice".

And that, Caz, is how you got your figures. If you don't agree then send me the ICNARC data with the date of vaccination, the date of COVID tests and the date of admission to ICU (and outcome). I will do that analysis. It's my thing. It's not yours.

Have some humility.

Like her “partner-in-crime”, Viki Male, I don’t think Caz is going down on the same side of history as Frances Kelsey. What do you think?